If you’re familiar with Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 and you’re just interested in finding the best theme for your site, then skip the blurbs below and dive in. Otherwise, you might find the following summary of benefits helpful in your decision making process. Either way, enjoy!
What is Shopify’s Online Store 2.0?
In a nutshell, it’s the latest version of Shopify’s platform that makes themes and apps easier to develop, customize, and maintain for store owners, their teams, and developers.
This big upgrade provided several key benefits:
Sections on every page: Previously, sections were only limited to the home page. Now, merchants can use sections on every page, making it much easier to customize the look and feel of their entire store without as much developer help.
Theme app extensions with app blocks: Previously, developers had to build integration logic for every existing theme and host asset themselves, which makes it difficult to guarantee consistent functionality and performance across all themes anywhere in the world. Now, however, developers can extend their apps into merchants’ themes with app blocks.
Improvements to metafields: Now, merchants can easily add metafields and properties without the use of APIs or code, making it much easier to add the unique content they need on the product page (ex: size chart, product dimensions, ingredients list, etc.)
Liquid input settings: Merchants can now add custom Liquid code to pages directly from the theme editor. This makes it much easier to use Online Store 2.0’s new features, allowing store owners to iterate quickly, and developers more time to focus on bigger projects.
Several developer tools: With this launch came a new suite of developer tools including Shopify GitHub integration, an updated Shopify CLI tool, and Theme check, making for a more robust and streamlined development process.
Why Use an Online Store 2.0 Theme?
This is the way Shopify is going and anyone not using this new infrastructure will be left behind. In fact, Shopify started requiring all themes and apps on their marketplace to use Online Store 2.0 at the end of 2021. You’re not required to upgrade your theme if it suits your needs, but you’ll likely want to soon to access all the best features and keep up with the new standards.
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in switching now, so you have two options:
Switch to a 2.0 theme on the market that fits your needs, which is why we made a list for you below.
Top 10 Shopify 2.0 Themes For Your Business
The following themes are in no particular order, but we've split them up by 4 free and 6 paid options. Your best choice comes down to personal preference, brand vision, and other variables, so we recommend skimming through each option for yourself before reading our conclusion and opinion at the end.
Dawn was Shopify’s first theme that launched in parallel with their OS 2.0 announcement. It has great support and a large community around it, so you can customize Dawn to be just about everything you need. This is Shopify’s main 2.0 theme, so it will continue to evolve with best practices and be supported very well for many years to come.
Benefits:
Chic and minimalist design to keep your shoppers focused on what matters most
Media-forward product page to better sell with visuals and storytelling
Flexible design options to bring your vision to life
Built for performance, flexibility, and ease of use
Can handle catalogs of any size
Suggested categories: clothing and accessories, health and beauty, or home and garden
This is Shopify’s first health and beauty specific theme after Dawn, and a great launchpad if your brand is in the same industry. Rather than customizing everything with Dawn, you can get a head start by using Sense.
Benefits:
Beautiful and energizing color options with extensive product detail layouts
Fresh and bright design with gradients and curved elements that flow nicely
Enhanced product detail options to include testimonials, videos, and clear descriptions
Advanced customization options to give you flexibility without touching code
Another beautiful theme built by Shopify, Taste, is a beautiful theme for specialty products. If you sell unique food or drink, for example, you’ll love the simple yet bold design of this theme for showcasing your delicious products.
Benefits:
Spacious design, bold headlines, and high contrast color palette to catch attention
Easily showcase quality descriptions, highlights, and FAQs to inform your buyers
Flexible layouts and styling to create the look and feel you desire with ease
A stylish theme designed by Shopify that’s perfect for artists, photographers, and creatives alike. Studio is perfect for visual storytelling and longer-form text sections to support your imagery.
Benefits:
Colorful accents and stylish typography to showcase your artistic collections and products
Beautiful collection-based navigation to highlight your featured art, galleries, new arrivals, and artist profiles
Easily adjust layouts and settings so your theme matches your artistic vision
This theme is the most popular one on Shopify’s marketplace with 95% positive reviews, packed full of features, and has excellent customer support from the Archetype team - founded by Shopify’s original creators of some of the most popular themes from the beginning.
Benefits:
Helpful and fast support when you need it to bring your vision to life
Powerful and versatile promotion designer to maximize your sales
Feature rich to help you complete with Fortune 500 retailers
Supports high volume stores with lots of visual storytelling
Suggested categories: clothing and accessories, health and beauty, sports and recreation
This theme allows you to easily add the power of animation and video for a seamless journey from your content to your store. Yet another amazing theme developed by Archetype that lets you bring your brand to life with stunning media. An overwhelming 98% positive reviews can’t be wrong.
Benefits:
Quality, kind, and fast customer support
20+ sections, product sales points and metafields, multiple templates, and more to meet any of your customization needs
Smooth animations for every part of your store to capture your shopper’s attention and make your site feel alive
Beautiful and flexible collection collage options for to uniquely showcase your products
Suggested categories: clothing and accessories, health and beauty, home and garden
Designed by Maestrooo for premium brands to showcase their high-end products. This theme has 92% positive reviews thanks to the impressive level of control offered and very responsive customer support.
Benefits:
Provides a luxury aesthetic out of the gate for a premium brand
Powerful “shop the look” section to enhance the customer experience
Media rich product page options for image stacking, videos, and more to fully showcase the quality of your products
Great for editorial style content and visual storytelling
Suggested categories: clothing and accessories, health and beauty, business equipment and supplies
In contrast to their Prestige theme, Maestrooo built Warehouse for brands who need to host large catalogs of products with a wide variety of categories, price points, and filtering options. It gives you a professional feel that’s on par with some of the large big box retailers.
Benefits:
Powerful collections that can easily support and filter 1000s of products
Versatile settings to easily modify the display of your products, content, metafields, and more
Optimized performance to be fast, even for large stores
Great for dropshippers, flash sales, and selling internationally
Suggested categories: electronics, home and garden, sports and recreation
Built by Clean Canvas, this theme is excellent for fashion, beauty, and fitness brands. Even brands that have used this theme for years are still in awe at how versatile and robust this theme is. It’s easy to use and customer service is fantastic.
Benefits:
Design everywhere with 20+ drag-and-drop sections to nail down your vision
Easily add product page tabs, metafields, size and price catalog filters, subcollections, video, FAQs and more
Smart and powerful product filters that make it easy for your shoppers to find the perfect style for them
Works well for fashion, beauty, and fitness brands
Suggested categories: clothing and accessories, health and beauty, sports and recreation
As a web performance company, we’re a bit biased towards themes built with speed in mind, so we’ll wrap up this list with a third theme from Archetype. Streamline is perfect for bold brands driving lots of visitors from social media who expect a snappy and smooth shopping experience.
Benefits:
Built with a focused design, quick load times, and instant product pages so your visitors are more likely to stick around and convert
Mobile-first design with easy animation and video integrations to keep your visitors engaged
Same deep level of customization and incredible customer support as their other themes
Great for brands driving lots of traffic from social media through ads and influencers
Suggested categories: clothing and accessories, health and beauty, sports and recreation
Which Theme Is The Best?
This depends on your brand, needs, team, and budget. Based on our list above, here’s our opinion to help you decide:
If you have a development team and you want to fully customize your store from the ground up, then Dawn is likely your best option. Shopify and devs from the community continue to iterate on this theme to make it one of the best, so you really can’t go wrong, it just might take a bit more time to tweak the design to your liking.
If you want to jumpstart with a professional design, then any of the 3 Archetype themes (Impulse, Motion, or Streamline) are hands down the best themes to power a world-class brand. Plus, they have a large community of users and incredible customer service, so they’ll be around for the long haul to support your growth.
If you’re on a tight budget and timeline, then pick one of the other free themes from the list that gets you closest to your vision so you can launch quickly with minimal risk.
Once you pick a theme and your site is live, we can help you further optimize your site’s web performance, enhance your user experience, and boost your conversions, because we've proven that speed equals more sales.
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Book a free 30-min call with one of our experts to assess your web performance and see if Render Better can improve your site.
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